When the Time Comes – What to Do When Cost of Living Gets Too High

This is something that has been swimming around in my head for months now, like a little piranha ready to gobble up brain power when my mind wanders. As a family and as a household, we’ve discussed our emergency preparedness resources and plans, but I don’t think we’ve ever approached the subject from a “what if we just simply don’t have any money for living?”

Most recently, I started thinking on this topic after a post on TipNut about preparedness. The foremost question that came into my mind was “when is it time to stop planning and start doing?”

As you all probably know by now, my husband and I are planning to buy land and build a tiny home some time in the next five years. We want to grow as much food as we can here, which is difficult in of itself because we’re in the desert, raise chickens, goats, and perhaps pigs, and live off the grid as much as possible.

Sure, these are wonderful plans, but what about now? And how much longer can those things remain plans before they turn into wishful, and pointless, thinking?

In five years, it’s not completely unlikely that the global economy could be bottomed out and we could be in a deep recession, perhaps even a depression. We know that the cost of everything is rising, that peak everything is looming darkly, and that there really isn’t anyone taking responsibility for any of it.

For those of us who have barely just begun to fight their own rampant consumerism and make ecologically minded choices, is it too late?

It’s simultaneously a question of “what can I do without?” and “how can I still have the things I can’t do without?”

Some of the questions asked on the Mother Earth Network forum include:

• Do you have a bit of land and the skills to grow and preserve a good portion of your own food? If not, could you join with your neighbors and garden together on open land one of you owns?
• What would it cost you to commute to your job if gas cost 10 times more — about $40 per gallon? Should you consider moving closer to your work, or getting a vehicle that gets better mileage? Maybe invest in an electric bicycle?
• Could you keep goats and learn to make your own cheese? If you don’t have much land, you could keep a couple of goats in a very small area and bring food to them. They love to eat twigs and leaves — perhaps you could harvest brush along public roadsides for their feed.
  
• Chickens can be great, sustainable sources of eggs and meat, but remember — commercial feed would cost 10 times more than it does now, so could you grow their feed at home?

For everything else, I found some great insight in down–to–earth’s post a little while back, illustrating what it is that we may need to be able to do in the future. There are life-skills that have died or gone soft in our culture that may very well need to be revived in coming times of distress.

I have to admit that it’s daunting to think of the ways we would need to work to replace the things we take for granted every day. It’s almost paralyzing to consider that our family has taken half of a step towards real sustainability and that there may come a time when it will be the only choice.

I don’t mean to sound doom-and-gloom; I’m just trying to be realistic about the how much life could change in a short period of time. And if it doesn’t? Well, living this way is better for the environment and is so much more fulfilling. Win win, I say.

For more information:

ETA: 75 Tips to Survive a Down-Economy
Everything on the rise except income and house prices
Peak Everything: 8 Things We Are Running Out Of And Why
Tightening your belt
Future Scenarios
Suburbs Retrofit (PDF)

Homemaking with Old Fashioned Skills

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